Flee to the Fields:The Founding Papers of the Catholic Land Movement
IHS Press, Norfolk, VA, 2003,
"It was not until the disasters of the twentieth century that the discovery was made that too big a strain had been put on accounting finance; and that its supposedly accurate records were but a mountainous tangle that nobody could unravel. The same disaster brought about the revelation that the inter-dependence of nations, so far from being a manifestation of the brotherhood of peoples, merely meant that a flood or a religious crusade in one country might...plunge the whole world into ruin."
~From the book, Kenrick Lloyd Kenrick, 1934
The Catholic Land Movement is one of the curiosities to be unearthed in the revival of interest in Catholic thought. A response to the misery and turmoil caused by both Capitalism and Communism, the movement rose and fell in the UK in the early 1930s. It was one of the rare attempts to put Catholic social thought into practice and inject it into society. Its aim was to reestablish small subsistence farming and to provide people with security from the "dominance of other wills," i.e., the employer who could give your job to a foreigner who will do it for less.
Principle spokesmen were G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc. Their support of this movement is another reason these two fellows should be approached with caution.
The CLM got so far as to set up training centers to inculcate blighters in the arts of tillage, beekeeping and blacksmithing. Using machinery was forbidden; it distorted the edifying closeness to God's creation. However the CLM could not get the Church or rich people to bankroll the set-up of actual land for the blighters. The Establishment was mainly interested in pitting Capitalism against Communism.
Also the CLM people were, as you may now suspect, cranks. Certainly they shared Belloc's hallucination that 11th-14th Century England was a Catholic paradise of justice, goodness and pious common folk, ruined by sheep-farming, the land-grab masked by the Reformation, privateering and the Industrial Revolution. There may have in fact, been no starvation or displacement in these centuries, competition may have been regulated by guilds, but therein occurred the murder of Thomas Beckett and numerous civil wars in which your lord--talk about dominance of other wills--could pull you away from your plow and hurl you against an enemy in some petty spat.
Nowhere in this book's collected essays do I read anything about a) what happens when the population of small farmers outgrows the finite amount of land, b) crop failures c) incompetent and lazy blighters who are sure to occur d) the temptation to sell up if cash is really needed. One gets the impression that the CLMers are guys with typical English romanticism re: the country who have been fairly successful with their large vegetable gardens and beehives.
However while the CLM solution to the mess of "Political Economy" was eccentric, its recognition and diagnosis of the problem was bang on. In describing the inevitable course and decline of industrialized nations, the CLMers predicted a U.S. in which jobs would disappear to foreign places, such jobs now include IT jobs which are flying to educated English-speaking, computer-savvy lowballers in India who will do a $90K job for $30k.
Capitalism and Communism rose as the influence of the Church fell. The result of keeping God behind closed doors or stamping Him out entirely is a morality in which people are reduced to mere organisms, organisms who are "in the long run, all dead." There is no difference between "That's your opinion!" and "That's business!" If there is no conception of people being created for something beyond this life, that this life must be their preparation for the next, it is easy to put profit before people, to manipulate them, capitalize on their vices, discard them when they are no longer needed, make them slaves of economics.
Copyright 2004 by Neal J. Conway